40. Arca – Arca (2017)
Swooning and soaring with balletic limpidity and operatic heft, on Arca Alejandra Ghersi’s third studio album, the willing artist finds her voice.
39. Olga Bell – Край (Krai) (2014)
Culturedarm said: ‘The word ‘krai’ – whose etymological connection to the name ‘Ukraine’ remains a matter of nationalistic dispute – once referred to the frontier regions of the Russian Empire. While Russia’s nine krais are today administered in much the same way as its oblasts, Olga Bell’s second long-play calls equally upon a neglected historical past and an unexplored cultural present. Scoring her compositions for cello, harp, electric guitar, bass, pitched drums, and mallet percussion, and pitch-shifting her vocals so that her pieces surge and uncoil in a profusion of voices, Bell draws from the syncopated rhythms of Asian and Russian folk song, foregrounding these in relation to the course of twentieth century avant-garde and electronic music. From the sustained liturgical wail which introduces ‘Krasnodar Krai’, Krai is a process of exposition through creation.’
38. Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘After the first two chapters in the Coin Coin series saw her leading variously-sized bands, on River Run Thee Matana Roberts channels her lone voice through layers of historical narrative, the poetry of her grandfather and diaries kept at sea merging with documents of slavery and a recording of Malcolm X as he seeks to deny accusations of racism. Her utterances loop over a background of conversational chatter, field recordings, and old standards, whose melodies twist and twine against wailing saxophone and buzzing electronic drones and beeps. In keeping with her practise of ‘panoramic sound quilting’, the album unspools on a thread, starting and finishing in one piece. In the process Roberts conjures up the old American South, recultivating its landscape for the present.’
37. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘From the funk groove that underlies ‘King Kunta’ and the soulful shuffle of ‘Institutionalized’, to the convulsed delivery on ‘u’ and the wobbling synth loop and high-pitched throwbacks of ‘Hood Politics’ – punctuated throughout by dexterous and doleful notes of free jazz – To Pimp a Butterfly exchanges the cinematic narrative of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City for something like a mural or tapestry, withholding the scene until the weaving of the final revelatory threads. Across dense passages of music Kendrick discusses the twin traps of fame and consumer capitalism, embarking on a journey of self discovery by means of a trip to Africa and a dialogue with Tupac, demanding all the while to understand and convey what it means to be in 2015 and black and alive.’
36. Mitski – Puberty 2 (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘Mitski lingers beyond the confines of classification, her immediate palette drawn from the sounds of 60s and 70s New York punk and proto-punk giving way to a modern indie sensibility, with surf and slacker rock and traces of sultry late-night soul and R&B pushing through a wistful electronic filter. She carries the same visceral raw power and do-it-yourself attitude as some of her near contemporaries like Waxahatchee and Frankie Cosmos, yet her voice is mellifluous and sometimes even cosseted by the surrounding noise, forceful and emotional and at moments teetering on the edge of operatic but at the same time always carrying with it a certain restraint.
On Puberty 2, her fourth and lushest album, she explores the transitory nature of happiness, the bubbling fixity of depression, cultural clashes, shame, desire, bodily sundering, and forbidden and forsaken and unrequited love. Against fuzzy feedback and thunder and rain – both literal and metaphorical – her vocal shifts show a dynamic mastery of soft-loud. ‘Fireworks’ and ‘Your Best American Girl’ demonstrate that amid all the fumbling and humiliating and ultimately failed gropes towards validation, beneath the charred surface something solid, valiant, even triumphant remains. ‘My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars’ skewers yet validates the grandiosity and pomposity of youth.’
35. Waxahatchee – American Weekend (2012)
Perhaps it’s personal preference for a low-fidelity sound and blurred stylistics, but it sometimes seems that fledgeling artists – whether they’re relatively new to recording music, or enjoying newfound freedom as they embark on solo careers – catch themselves in moments of raw and untethered and idiosyncratic brilliance, encapsulating a flash state of mind and a relationship with the wider world as it shifts and flickers. Take for instance Jolie Holland’s debut Catalpa, or some of the other albums on this list like Love Remains by How To Dress Well or Brazil by Jófríður Ákadóttir.
American Weekend by Waxahatchee marked just such a moment. Katie Crutchfield has continued to churn out minor revelations, concise and forthright albums brimming with emotional resonance, by turns mining indie rock and veering into fully-fledged rock and roll or psychedelic territory. Yet the sheer urgency of American Weekend – a collection of eleven perfectly discrete songs depicting bodies butting up against each other and drifting inevitably apart – remains hard to beat. Was there a sonically heavier or more emphatic song this decade than ‘Luminary Blake’?
34. ANOHNI – HOPELESSNESS (2016)
A crystalline cry of alarm, a love wail in the age of the Anthropocene.
33. Wayne Shorter Quartet – Without a Net (2013)
Wayne Shorter’s first album on Blue Note for forty-three years found the saxophonist – accompanied by John Patitucci on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and Danilo Perez on piano – as carefree and inventive as ever.
32. JFDR – Brazil (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘The debut solo album by Jófríður Ákadóttir – already well established in her home of Iceland and beyond thanks to her work as the frontwoman of Samaris and Pascal Pinon – offers an uncanny juxtaposition of elements. Guitar and piano loops remain tautly elegant even as they are doused in feedback, even as they unfold with a simple and carefree gait. Percussion shifts moment to moment from the granular to the monolithic, sandy and scuzzy and bold and brash. Synths reverberate and then are briefly suspended in air, loping and lulling and eternally washing. The sound palette broken down to its component parts is a fusion of sixties folk and garage rock, some of the droning sensibilities of John Cale-era Velvet Underground, and new age music, yet the invocation here is utterly modern and distinctly fresh.
In the midst are Jófríður’s vocals, sometimes swirling in the mix, other times impressing themselves more steadily, a sort of choral spoken word. The lyrics straddle uniquely the personal and the mythological, nowhere better than on the album-opener and standout track ‘White Sun’. A road trip, even a single journey conjures a mini-history of Iceland, natural and mythic, terns and other seabirds, the nighttime sun, and the ‘intense wonders’ of the island giving way to a vision of shared destiny, as a breakup song seamlessly attains the communal.’
31. Jlin – Black Origami (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘On Black Origami Jlin pushes footwork beyond its usual locales, its roots in Chicago and its destination in face-offs at parties and clubs, on a dynamic path that encompasses world music while treating it as a ripe discovery, her honed electronics terraforming as they go. Coiling, unfurling, intimately concerned with space at the same time as it rushes headlong, there’s not a branch of music it does not touch, nor a brain centre or nerve ending. On the opener and title track, computer game blips and beeps, roving ambient swipes with an industrial sheen, and rolling rapid-fire drums somehow cohere in a song which enacts the forming of voice, all palate. ‘Enigma’ takes a Missy Elliot-esque vocal sample and layers it over skittering tabla.
Glistening wind chimes, a Hindi vocal, and synthetic birdsong provide the access points on the bright and airy ‘Kyanite’: if this is a forest, we’re constantly emerging through the canopy for a view of life from above the treetops. On ‘Holy Child’ with William Basinski, a Baltic folk sample is transformed through operatic swoops, muzzled jazz, and syncopated percussion into something balletic. Anxious polyrhythms characterise ‘Nyakinyua Rise’, the marching drums on ‘Hatshepsut’ open triumphantly before being drilled into something more dangerous and defiant, while amid the reverberating beats and slinking shakers of the eastern-infused ‘Calcination’, the short track remains resolutely choral. ‘1%’ with Holly Herndon samples Resident Evil, more apprehensive than frightened, with a segue just before the midpoint into something lovely and watery. The youthful exuberance of ‘Never Created, Never Destroyed’ proves a late highlight.’
30. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘In retrospect, it is tempting to see everything about The Life of Pablo – from the rambling prelude of GOOD Fridays and title changes, the tentative release of the record amid fashion shows and exclusivity disputes, the fragmentary series of updates which stretched until the addition of ‘Saint Pablo’ four months later, to the sprawling nature, cleaving soundscapes, and lyrical content of the music he produced – as a symbol or sign of Kanye West’s faltering health and excessively heightened mental state. Overworked as he committed to a one-of-a-kind tour between fashion launches and family crisis, struggling with the demons of fame and his own penchant for causing controversy – whether for the sake of publicity or in an artistic gesture borne from the need to feel freed from restraint – in November he was hospitalised and cancelled his remaining tour dates.
But his relatively brief period of hospitalisation was no more a culmination than the record itself. Some of its songs had a long gestation – ‘Wolves’ a notable example, howling plaintively in public for more than a year – and the changes wrought by West were always considered, and wound up giving much more than they took. This was an artist in a creative flourish, and in full control of his work. The sprawling nature of the record, as well as its staggered, sometimes swaggering, sometimes self-doubting release, not only reconfigured our sense of the album as something static and singular, but perfectly suited Kanye, who has made the embrace of life’s conflicts and contrasts his ethos.
It is a Joycean pursuit, collages with a dizzying array of textures and subtle and sudden tonal shifts, the putting together and repurposing of sacred texts and ephemera, willing portals out of mistakes. The Life of Pablo features the best moments and best runs of Kanye’s career, from the opening choral salvo of ‘Ultralight Beam’ to ‘Famous’, or as the placidity of ‘Waves’ ripples out through ‘FML’, ‘Real Friends’, and ‘Wolves’, a sequence full of defiance in the face of fear and regret. ‘Saint Pablo’ provides the record with a holy apostrophe. Nobody else can take us in the space of seconds from anal bleaching to a state of unfettered and helpless harmonic bliss.’
29. Mount Eerie – Clear Moon (2012)
‘If I look / Or if I don’t look / Clouds are always / Passing over’ sings Phil Elverum, the opening lines to ‘the Place I Live’, Clear Moon‘s third song. Transposed to the natural world, clear-eyed, compassionate, and full of shifting feeling, Elverum revels in our small continuous moments. Clear Moon was the first of two records he released in 2012: both it and the denser, more experimental Ocean Roar focused immediately upon his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, and were recorded there in the large room of a converted church. Through the detail of his observations, the scope of his speculations and misgivings, and the subtle tracings of the landscape, Clear Moon stretches beyond the provincial to what is truly essential. Accompanied by a rumbling acoustic guitar, steady percussion, and the odd backing vocal which wisps and winds, Elverum’s voice sustains and encompasses.
28. Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
We’ll always have ‘Video Games’, and Honeymoon with its standouts ‘Art Deco’ and ‘High by the Beach’ was glassy and amorphous and wet, but as she skirts the psyche of the present Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana Del Rey’s boldest and brashest and most accomplished work yet.
27. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Mature Themes (2012)
Melodious if sometimes manic, motley and idiosyncratically multi-voiced, blending the facile or puerile with the emotionally complex, Mature Themes – following the rhapsodic breakthrough of Before Today – finds the singer navigating the margins of post-Golden Age Hollywood, twirling on the floor of the discotheque but gazing dolorously out to sea, sexed-up but with a sense of yearning, and yes, ultimately more mature.
The satanism of ‘Early Birds of Babylon’ and the spunk of ‘Symphony of the Nymph’, with ‘Schnitzel Boogie’ sandwiched in between, provide Mature Themes with its strange but undeniably catchy centre. Yet its heart resides in the title song, ‘Only in Dreams’, and ‘Baby’, an obscure cover from Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 album Dreamin’ Wild, which Pink imbues with ethereal soul, funk, and Flamingos-style ‘shoo-bops’. For a line which not only shakes the foundations of truth and expressibility but seems to shy agonisingly away from the very possibility of mutual relations, try ‘I’m sorry but it’s true / Truth is shameful and vile / So I’m not real and I won’t call you / And I want to talk about mature things (daily)’.
26. Björk – Vulnicura (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘Björk has never been afraid of unravelling herself through song, but especially after the relative outgoingness of Volta and Biophilia, this was a startling and shatteringly poignant act of self-exposition. From the first line Vulnicura throws ‘a juxtapositioning fate’ into sharp relief, recording in descriptive fragments the deterioration of a long-term relationship. Through drawn-out vocals and a soundscape of spare isolation – the result of Björk’s string arrangements and throbbing production aided by Arca and, on ‘Family’, The Haxan Cloak – Björk enters new territory while at the same time folding back and filtering through the full extent of her career. The feelings and the memories of love and loss linger and return in blazing bursts, but at their core stands the persevering self, which takes its ultimate form in the reverberating close to ‘Black Lake’.’
25. Vince Staples – Summertime ’06 (2015)
A coming-of-age whose detours turn out to be shortcuts, shunting us one street along and asking us to view the world all askew, Summertime ’06 established Vince Staples as one of rap’s most focused and singular storytellers.
24. Zola Jesus – Stridulum II (2010)
A chant between two worlds, the ceaseless continuous and the coming apocalypse, the living and the near deceased, as the falling sun and flickering moon of the evening give way to the pristine darkness of the night, the creaking of a doorway and a wanton foot and one chance out, in the end nothing wallops quite like Stridulum, with its encircling synths and fabulistic lyrics and insistent industrial percussion and Zola Jesus’ biggest instrument of all, her utterly transfixing voice.
23. Kelela – Take Me Apart (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘The process and the narrative of Take Me Apart – Kelela’s studio debut after the acclaimed Cut 4 Me mixtape and Hallucinogen EP – begins with ‘Frontline’, which might sound like an apt title for an album opener, but the track itself finds Kelela putting her back foot first. Its late-night synth throbs segue into a tale of breakup and defiance, Kelela’s voice besieging her about-to-be ex lover from all angles before the click of heels and the shuffle of gravel signal her walking out the door, two bleeps and she’s in the driver’s seat, moving off for someplace else. It’s a conjuring trick she pulls off again and again throughout Take Me Apart, her layered, shifting vocals buttressed by pristine synthesizers and whirring percussion, creating senses of place utterly tangible in their dimensions and for their feelings and atmospheres even while the specifics remain abstract.
The breakup inevitably doesn’t take, and we pass through chance street encounters and passionate nighttime soirees to the lull and steady acceptance of ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Better’, before ‘LMK’ – one of the sharpest and sultriest and club-friendliest tracks of the summer – provides a reset, strident steps towards new romance. Amid the dripping sensuality of ‘S.O.S.’ Kelela takes full command of all the body’s pleasure centres; a burgeoning, burnishing openness characterises ‘Blue Light’; ‘Onanon’ bristles and bubbles with conflict; and after Kelela sings ‘All the light you keep brings out the darkness in me’ on ‘Turn to Dust’, screeches by turns mechanistic and animalistic figure vulnerability and give way to elegant perseverance on ‘Bluff’. ‘Altedena’ then is no mere sendoff, a message to a loved one which doubles as a message to the self, graceful and pared back and broadening in scope with each shuffle and sigh to encompass patience, striving, and hope.’
22. Lorde – Melodrama (2017)
Cutting-edge with a vintage spirit, Lorde is like a submersible, diving deep into endless house parties and coming up for air with these pulsing and palpitating, preternaturally wise, barely modulated pop anthems, heartfelt and lovelorn but always composed, never hapless. Broadcast this boom, boom, boom, boom: they’ll come, they’ll dance to it.
21. Laurel Halo – Quarantine (2012)
Something lingers in the isolation chamber, pliant but no longer malleable, coiling and squirming and seeking its way through the cracks. On Quarantine Laurel Halo’s unfettered vocals push through contaminated landscapes with verdant sprouts.
